This article will demonstrate how to incorporate OpenCL into heterogeneous workflows via a general-purpose “click together tools” framework that can stream arbitrary messages within a single workstation, across a network of machines, or within a cloud computing framework.

In his second tutorial, GPGPU expert Rob Farber discusses OpenCL™ memory spaces and the OpenCL memory hierarchy, and how to start thinking in terms of work items and work groups. This tutorial also provides a general example to facilitate experimentation with a variety of OpenCL kernels.

Read Rob Farber’s Massively Parallel Programming series. This fourth article in a series on portable multithreaded programming using OpenCL™ will discuss the OpenCL™ runtime and demonstrate how to perform concurrent computations among the work queues of heterogeneous devices.

This fifth article in a series on portable multithreaded programming using OpenCL™ Rob Farber discusses OpenCL™ buffers and demonstrates how to tie computation to data in a multi-device, multi-GPU environment.

Rob Farber is a senior scientist and research consultant at the Irish Center for High-End Computing in Dublin, Ireland and Chief Scientist for BlackDog Endeavors, LLC in the US.

Rob has been on staff at several US national laboratories including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He also served as an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, co-founded two successful start-ups, and has been a consultant to Fortune 100 companies. His articles have appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal and Scientific Computing, among others. He recently completed a book teaching massive parallel computing.